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"The Unexpected Uselessness of Philosophy"

by Steve Sailer National Post 12/29/99

Is there a more prestigious job title than "philosopher"? Yet, in what
other profession has more brainpower made less progress? In his last book,
Nobel Laureate physicist Steven Weinberg pointedly titled two chapters "The
Unexpected Usefulness of Mathematics" and "The Unexpected Uselessness of
Philosophy." Even the most esoteric math has helped him describe the cosmos.
But the only value Weinberg ever found in reading philosophers was when they
refuted other philosophers who had clouded his mind. While engineers or
farmers or bartenders have all learned a trick or two over the years,
philosophers mostly either rehash the same old mistakes or dream up new ones
that are even more ridiculous.

To this day, most philosophers suffer from Plato's disease: the assumption
that reality fundamentally consists of abstract essences best described by
words or geometry. (In truth, reality is largely a probabilistic affair best
described by statistics.) Today's postmodern philosophers deny the very
existence of science, nature and truth, largely because their favourite verbal
abstraction of "equality" is undermined by the brute statistical reality of
human biological differences. The philosopher Richard Rorty recently informed
us in Atlantic Monthly that " 'The homosexual,' 'the Negro,' and 'the female'
are best seen not as inevitable classifications of human beings but rather as
inventions that have done more harm than good." Therefore, according to Rorty,
many deconstructionists "go on to suggest that quarks and genes probably are
[inventions] too." You have to be as eminent a philosopher as Rorty to believe
that the category of "the female" is a mere social convention.
Deconstructionism is the result of philosophers being shocked to learn that
reality is not Platonic (e.g., races are no more sharply defined than are
extended families) and thus deciding to give up believing in reality rather
than in Platonism.

Fortunately, one school of philosophy has actually taught us some valuable
lessons over the centuries: the anti-abstract British tradition of Roger
Bacon, Francis Bacon and David Hume, with its emphasis on realism, common
sense and the scientific method. One of the last of this great line was the
blunt-spoken Australian David Stove. Roger Kimball has collected the late
philosopher's often hilarious and always politically impious essays in a new
anthology titled Against the Idols of the Age.

Stove simply shreds his fellow philosophers. He turns his flamethrower on
those "absolutely effortless pseudo-discoveries that philosophers make, and on
which their fame rests." For instance, "Plato's discovery of 'universals' went
as follows: 'It is possible for something to be a certain way and for
something else to be the same way. So, there are universals!' (Tumultuous
applause, which lasts 2,400 years.)"

The British empirical school, however, tends to lose its finest pupils to
more practical trades, just as the few performance artists who can connect
with the outside world, like Andy Kaufman or David Byrne, shun the narrow
playpen of performance art in order to expand the boundaries of comedy or
rock. Similarly, Hume's friend Adam Smith left moral philosophy to become the
first great economist. Political philosopher James Madison got roped into
writing the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights and being president. Stove,
though, stuck it out in the philosophy racket, and even he was susceptible to
his field's failings, as becomes clear when he turns from purely philosophical
issues to ones of sociology and science.

For instance, he begins one chapter, "I believe that the intellectual
capacity of women is on the whole inferior to that of men." This is brave, but
is it true? Fortunately, IQ researchers have amassed much statistical evidence
on this question since 1912, when Cyril Burt first noticed that males and
females had the same average test scores. Unfortunately, Stove uses none of
it. While his reasoning is impressive, it is also in the Grand Tradition of
Western Philosophy: namely, almost 100% fact-free. (Elsewhere, Stove readily
admits that philosophers "have no more knowledge of any matter that could
serve as the premises of their reasonings than the next man has.") But even
worse than ignoring statistical data, philosophers seldom understand
statistical logic. In this case, for example, while the IQs of men and women
are equal on average, men's IQ's are more variable. Thus, as any woman could
testify, there are more really stupid men. But, there are also far more male
geniuses.

Stove flagrantly exhibits philosophers' worst trait -- emphasizing verbal
abstractions over statistical tendencies -- when he ill-advisedly attacks the
grandest offshoot of his own school of British empiricism, Darwinism, which he
calls a "mere festering mass of errors."

For example, Richard Dawkins' famous 1976 book, The Selfish Gene,
describes how the genes that proliferate the most are those that most
successfully induce their host organisms (e.g., us) to make copies of them
(e.g., by making babies). Stove gives endless reasons why genes should not be
called "selfish." Some of his arguments are sensible. (Although some are
remarkably obtuse, such as when he scoffs that if Dawkins were right, somebody
could make a fortune replicating images of Elvis Presley. Apparently, Stove
never visited Graceland's gift shop).

But, ultimately, so what? That our language lacks the perfect adjective to
describe this tendency -- "selfish" really isn't all that bad, but "dynastic"
might be better, and in the future "Dawkinsian" might prove best -- is a
shortcoming of English, not of neo-Darwinism.

Similarly, Stove's attacks on Charles Darwin consist of isolating the most
overstated phrases in Darwin's work, then proving them "false" by citing
exceptions. This is pointless because exceptions can disprove only abstract
laws, not statistical tendencies -- something Stove himself points out when
criticizing Popper's theory of falsifiability as the basis of science. (It is,
he argues, a species of perfectionism.) For example, Stove claims that Darwin
"first went wrong about man" when he became impressed by economist Thomas
Malthus' notion that humans always strive to maximize their numbers. But, to
cite one of Stove's many examples, doesn't "fondness for alcohol" interfere?

Now, it's an open empirical question whether drink diminishes the quantity
of mating. When I was a bachelor, bartenders repeatedly assured me of the
contrary. Still, at least in my case, their advice seldom panned out, so let's
assume for the moment that Stove is right. What we see, then, is another
triumph of Darwinism as an explanatory tool. Mediterranean peoples such as
Jews and Italians, who have been drinking wine for 10,000 years, have evolved
impressive genetic and cultural defences against becoming alcoholics. In
contrast, Northern Europeans, who first obtained alcohol only a few millennia
ago, haven't fully adapted genetically to alcohol yet, and thus must often
turn to cruder cultural responses like teetotalling, prohibition and the Betty
Ford Clinic. Finally, those racial groups unfortunate enough not to taste
alcohol and other sugar-based products until the last few centuries, such as
the First Nations peoples of Canada and the Australian Aborigines, are
currently being devastated by alcoholism, tooth decay and diabetes.

Philosophers of the world, get real! You have nothing to lose but your
irrelevance.